The World Is Running Out of Raw Materials for Everything
- Posted by: Zach Frechette
- on April 20, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Have you ever stopped to consider that at a certain point, our consumption of everything from consumer electronics to prescription drugs might be limited by raw materials? I hadn’t either, but apparently we’re perilously close in some cases to running out of common things like copper, tin, and silver. The above chart breaks down when we’ll run out, both by current rate of consumption, and by half the U.S. consumption rate (which seems loaded and random, but is nevertheless interesting).
At current rates, we only have 13 years left of indium consumption (used in LCD manufacturing), 42 years of lead (batteries and pipes), and 29 years of silver. (Insert silver-plated, battery-operated LCD joke here.) What the chart doesn’t say is how close we are to developing sustainable alternatives to these things, or what impact new technology or improved recycling might have on these numbers. Still, it’s a very sobering assessment of the impact we’ve had on our world.
Viz Gizmodo.
DISCUSSION: 12 Comments
That’s not GOOD.
Could this potentially screw up Moore’s law and related phenomena?
Are these estimates for total reserves on Earth or just the totals of known reserves?
FYI, this infographic was published in the UK magazine New Scientist some time ago, and the data is from 2006, so you’ll need to deduct three years from each prediction when reading it (!). It also obscures a few things, in my view, because its scales aren’t linear. You have to read it very carefully to see that, for example, the average US consumer depletes a massive amount of phosphorus each year (107kg, presumably for use in fertiliser); and that we have over 1,000 years of aluminium left but only a few decades of very basic metals such as copper, lead and tin.
This is a great graphic for those people who think recycling isn’t effective. I know recycling takes a lot of energy, but harvesting these raw materials straight from the Earth takes at least the same amount (usually more). It’s better we recycle our waste instead of letting it sit in landfills; that way raw materials can perform like a cycle, much the way water and carbon do naturally.
Soon we’ll be harvesting all of the “raw” resources straight out of the landfills.
This is my concern with trying to convert all gas fueled cars into electric cars. At what point do we run out of battery materials?
No biggie. We’re gonna run out of oil first, which will help to extend the life on a *lot* of these things.
Wow. Sobering indeed.
Need to explore options for mining from neighboring planets I say.
to say this is serious is an understatement…!
That’s why the regenerative capacity of bio-degradables is important. Should we start sketching more or less? Should we plant rubber trees in the faint hope that they will allow us to build computers that don’t require shiny covers and stuff? Let’s discuss!